Survey123 Report Photo Date Formatting

[CurtisDeVault]

Recently I have had an issue with Survey123 Feature Reports where my dates stopped showing up. The place holder used is ${Photo | getValue:”date” format:”DD/MM/YYYY”} and returns nothing (this used to work and stopped just recently). If I remove the formatting option to ${Photo | getValue:”date”} it returns the date of the photo as "YYYY/MM/DD". Is anyone aware of any workarounds to get my dates to show up in my preferred date format?

[Shwu-jingJeng]

Hi Curtis,

I was able to see the same behavior as you described. I encourage you to submit this issue as a bug via Esri Support. Our Support team will assign an official bug number for your records. This number can be used to search for and subscribe to the bug on the Esri Support site. If the issue is reported by other customers it will be attached to the same bug report, which helps us assess the impact of the issue and prioritize it accordingly.

Thanks,

[CurtisDeVault]

Will do.

[JodyZhengLiu]

Hi Curtis DeVault‌,

We stopped allowing format date pulled from image Exif in the recent release because the date information is stored as a string without UTC in Exif, that means we don't know which time zone it was in when image created, thus highly possible the formatted date would be wrong unless the image was created in UTC +0 as we assumed previously.

Thanks,

Jody Zheng Liu

[CurtisDeVault]

So what happens to those (like myself) that know what time zone the photo was acquired in?

[JodyZhengLiu]

Hi Curtis,

Unfortunately, it's not possible to add a time zone to date pulled from Exif in the Feature Report. The workaround is to add a Date question type to the survey to capture the actual date when collecting new data, and for existing data, the most convenient way I can think of is to batch process them by a script on feature service level. 

Thanks,

Jody Zheng Liu

[ZachPearo]

Hi, I'm also having the same issue.  The problem with the work around is that we use the Exif data to fill in the fields because the photos could be used in future legal cases and the information must be pulled from the image.  Any chance this can be allowed again?

Best,

Zach

[JodyZhengLiu]

Hi Zach Pearo‌,

Thanks for the feedback. We are trying to work around that due to poor implementation of the time zone filed in Exif. May I encourage you to submit this issue as an Enhancement via Esri Support? It helps us assess the impact of the issue and prioritize it accordingly.

Thanks,

Jody Zheng Liu

[MichaelDavis3]

From looking at a ton of images from Android and iOS devices it does look like they record things a little bit differently.  iOS gives you a time stamp in local time + the time zone, Android give you a time stamp in local time and a GPS Date stamp and GPS Date stamp in UTC time... so it's a little more work to get there but it seems like the info is there.  It's a shame to throw out the capability entirely just because it takes a little work to get there.

Zach Pearo‌ I'd be cautious about relying on EXIF too much... it's trivial to change and not at all persistent.

[DanielMurillo]

Hello @CurtisDeVault and @JodyZhengLiu .

Do you recall having a different workaround after this thread was discussed?

Also, if you submitted the issue as a bug via ESRI support, did you get a bug number?

Thanks in advance for any info you have for this.